Dignitas clinic: last refuge or suicide factory?

The Dignitas assisted suicide clinic has challenged Britain euthanasia's laws to the core from a nondescript industrial estate outside Zurich in Switzerland.

By John Bingham

7:00AM GMT 06 Mar 2009

For more than 100 British people, including Peter and Penelope Duff, it has provided a final refuge from unbearable suffering.

But for others it is simply a "suicide factory" whose very existence represents a dangerous challenge to the principle of the sanctity of human life.

More recently it has come under investigation amid suggestions of profiteering from vulnerable patients.

For more than 10 years the centre, founded by lawyer Ludwig Minelli as a non-profit organisation, has operated in a legal limbo – permissible under Swiss law so long as no one has assisted in the suicide for selfish gain, but in direct defiance of that in the countries surrounding it.

So far nearly 1,000 people from across Europe and beyond have travelled there for the chance to give themselves a lethal dose of barbiturate.

They are left alone in a room as do so but their death is filmed and the footage handed to a coroner to prove that there has been no coercion.

For 23-year-old Dan James, a promising rugby player from Worcestershire who was paralysed when a scrum collapsed on him in 2007, it offered a chance to escape from what he was said to see as a "second-class existence".

The case exposed the ambiguity of British laws on assisted suicide.

His parents, Mark and Julie, who were at his side when he died there last year, found themselves under investigation by police.

But the Director of Public Prosecutions later ruled that bringing charges would not be in the "public interest" and even passed on public condolences.

When Debbie Purdy, a multiple sclerosis sufferer, attempted to clarify the law by seeking a guarantee that her husband would not be prosecuted for taking her to Switzerland, three High Court judges declined to offer the "absolute security of mind" she sought.

There was outrage in some quarters December when the death of 59-year-old motor neurone disease sufferer Craig Ewert was shown on a Sky documentary.

While many felt the programme went too far others described it as moving and dignified.

Last month it emerged that Swiss prosecutors have demanded the organisation open its accounts amid questions over where the £6,000 fee patients pay goes.

There have been claims that one woman was charged as much as £61,000 and claims that patients' ashes have been illegally dumped in a lake.

The clinic was evicted from its original base, a flat in Zurich itself, in 2007 after neighbours complained about bodies being taken out in the lift, and hearses parked outside.